Where are all the kids?

Originally published in 2014.

Dusk on a residential street. Lightning bugs pulse first here, then there. A lawn mower whirrs far in the distance as somebody races darkness, hoping to find not too many missed lines the next morning. Otherwise, quiet. Too quiet.

Where are all the kids?

It’s something I ask my wife more and more frequently on our evening walks. There are no kids. No kids catching lightning bugs. No kids playing hopscotch. No kids riding bicycles up and down driveways or wrestling in yards or turning cartwheels or.

Or anything.

I feel more and more like a character in a Ray Bradbury story, strolling down some woebegone street in a slice of small-town America that has been scooped up in its entirety and re-planted on Mars. Everything perfectly replicated — houses, garages, shrubs, roads and stop lights.

Everything but kids.

I know this city has children. I see buses filled with them on weekday afternoons during the school year. I see their photos in the paper and on friends’ Facebook pages. I see them in malls and restaurants.

I just don’t see them outside. Not at dusk, not anytime.

When I mention this to other people, I always get the same answer. “Oh, when I was a kid, Mom pushed me out the door in the morning and only let me back in for lunch and dinner and when the streetlights came on. We didn’t sit in front of the TV all day or play video games or text on phones like kids these days.”

This is the answer no matter the age of the respondent, including people who were just kids themselves a few years ago, when older people said the same thing about their generation.

In my own youth, my sister and I played outside a lot, but I’m not fooling myself — I was never an outdoorsy-type. The big difference between summer and winter was that I could read a book on the porch in the summer instead of on the couch in the winter.

Still, we went outside. We set up Slip N’ Slides and got sunburned and played basketball and blew bubbles and built makeshift ramps for our bikes and just ran around.

Maybe parents don’t think it’s safe for kids to do that nowadays. Too many stories about too many creeps. Maybe in a lot of single-parent or two-income homes, kids have to come in early, even in the summer, and go to bed to get up before dawn the next day to be carted off to childcare. Maybe spontaneous play really has been replaced by more scripted scenarios — organized sports, playdates at the movies or crawling through plastic, yellow tubes that spill out into boxes of rubber balls at fast-food franchises.*

Or maybe kids really are content to stay indoors, even on beautiful early summer evenings, when dusk hangs in the air like a gauze curtain, and watch TV and play video games.

One house on our walking route, however, is like an oasis to my soul. There, kids are doing all the things that I expect to see kids do on a beautiful summer night. They’re skipping, yelling, playing catch, and doodling with chalk. They look dirty — the glorious kind of dirty that comes from lots of exercise and from finding worms in the drive after a hard rain, the wonderful kind of dirty that parents have to scrub off in the bathtub once the sun goes down.

But in the surrounding yards, nothing. Silence. The flickering of TV screens through picture windows, and uncaptured lightning bugs holding sway over all.

Where are all the kids?

*In 2022, I would add extreme heat to the list of reasons why children might not be outside as much. 

Red wagon

Originally published May or June 2009 in The Alliance Review.

As my wife and I were walking Sunday morning, we passed a young mother pulling her son in a wagon. Suddenly, he jumped out and raced through what was evidently his yard. “I’ll see you ’round back,” he shouted over his shoulder. Then he was gone.

It is as apt a metaphor for raising kids as I can think of. One moment you’re pulling the wagon, keeping one eye peeled for what’s ahead and the other on the precious cargo behind; the next, you’re staring down at the handle and the remnants of the dependence, wondering what happened, stunned at how quickly the change occurred.

The night before, my wife and I and a few family members and friends had been sitting around a picnic table in the dying light of a beautiful summer’s day, watching as our daughter opened high school graduation cards and gifts. I realized that a major part of our lives as parents was coming to an end. We’d navigated the stormy seas of adolescence: the first love and heartbreak, the academic and athletic successes and failures, the mood swings that took us up and down like yoyos. We’d survived the driver’s license and the dances, the sprained ankles and pulled ligaments, the auditions and ruminations and recriminations (whoever decided it was important for kids to know at age 18 how they will spend the rest of their lives was crazy) that go along with shepherding another life until he or she can start making intelligent decisions without you.

All those times when she and her friends would turn the front porch into a tent city with help from blankets and bed sheets, or we would hand out Popsicles or hot chocolate at the breakfast bar, or play backyard badminton until the grass was wet with dew and it was too dark to see the birdie – those times were gone, proof as always that the days and weeks go slow, but the months and years go fast.

And it occurred to me then that somewhere in the last year, our role had shifted from “sage on the stage” to “guide on the side,” that while she might still come to us for advice and financial help, our days of pointing her in one direction and saying march – and with a headstrong young lady, I could count those days on one hand and have a few fingers left over, anyway – were up.

I wouldn’t have it any other way. I know parents who want to wind back the clock and keep their children forever young, dependent, and innocent. If I were like Peabody and his boy Sherman and had access to a Wayback Machine, I’d want to relive an hour or two every now and again, but I wouldn’t want to stay there.

For one thing, there are too many cool things coming up to spend too much time looking back. I don’t know what shape those things will take, whether they will be the traditional college graduation, wedding, and grandchildren, or if they’ll be more off the beaten track. Likely, there will be a few heartbreaks and unexpected detours (expected detours hardly qualify, do they?), because we forget that the Chinese expression “May you live in interesting times,” is really a curse. Nobody has a guarantee on anything other than this moment, right now, today, anyway, but I’m cautiously optimistic, because it doesn’t pay to be anything else.

“You know,” my mom said to me that Saturday night, “it wasn’t all that long ago that I was planning your graduation party, and now here I am again.”

Parenthood is like that, I guess. I talk to some people who are a little farther along the road and they tell me to wait until my daughter turns 21, or 30, or 50. And I know I won’t have long to wait, because I just blinked and went from 18 to 41, myself.

So my heart was full last Sunday when I saw the little guy jump from the wagon and make his break. I wondered if it would be the last time his mother would ever pull him in a wagon, and maybe she didn’t even realize it.

If I were the advice-giving kind, I would tell her to hop into the wagon herself and hold on tight. It’s the bumpiest, most wonderful ride in the world, and she’ll need all four wheels just to keep up.




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